The author cannot agree with the linguists who see only speaker's or hearer's action in meaning and deny the existence of “meaning” itself.
When we are faced with a “thing”, we can only have a vague impression about it until we discern what it is. In order to discern what the “thing” is, we have to compare what we see with the memory of what we saw or learned before. Meaning is a memorial image of the past experience preserved by means of a form which consists of a sequence of phonemes.
When we refer to a “thing”, we have to have beforehand an apperceived image of the “thing” in our mind. We do not only accept the “thing” as a mere “thing”, but we have a plan for the immediate future as to how to act towards the “thing”. Meaning is a memorial image of the past experience and offers a “field” for the future plan. Thus, meaning is a “schema” and at the same time a “sphere.”
Among the heterogeneous sense-data which we receive from the “thing”, we distinguish and abstract the important by means of the “schema”, and make out an apperceived image. In other words, the “present” is modified by the “past”. On the other hand, in speech, the “schema” is always being modified or “fed back”(as it is called in cybernetics) by the very nature of the thing and by the listeners's response. In other words, the “past” is modified by the “present”.
Meaning is formed not only passively but also actively in speech.

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